Stream of consciousness
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind" of a narrator. The term was coined by Daniel Oliver in 1840 in First Lines of Physiology: Designed for the Use of Students of Medicine, when he wrote,
- If we separate from this mingled and moving stream of consciousness, our sensations and volitions, which are constantly giving it a new direction, and suffer it to pursue its own spontaneous course, it will appear, upon examination, that this, instead of being wholly fortuitous and uncertain, is determined by certain fixed laws of thought, which are collectively termed the association of ideas.
Better known, perhaps, is the 1855 usage by Alexander Bain in the first edition of The Senses and the Intellect, when he wrote, "The concurrence of Sensations in one common stream of consciousness–on the same cerebral highway–enables those of different senses to be associated as readily as the sensations of the same sense". But it is commonly credited to William James who used it in 1890 in his The Principles of Psychology. In 1918, the novelist May Sinclair (1863–1946) first applied the term stream of consciousness, in a literary context, when discussing Dorothy Richardson's novels. Pointed Roofs (1915), the first work in Richardson's series of 13 semi-autobiographical novels titled Pilgrimage, is the first complete stream-of-consciousness novel published in English. However, in 1934, Richardson comments that "Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf & D.R. ... were all using 'the new method', though very differently, simultaneously". There were, however, many earlier precursors and the technique is still used by contemporary writers.
Precursor
Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887) by Édouard Dujardin can be perceived as a precursor of the 'stream of consciousness' writing-style, because of his renunciation of chronology in favor of free association: "Il a pour objet d'évoquer le flux ininterrompu des pensées qui traversent l'âme du personnage au fur et à mesure qu'elles naissent sans en expliquer l'enchaînement logique." he wrote in the essay "Le Monologue intérieur" (1931)
Thereby anticipating the stream of consciousness narratives of Joyce and of Virginia Woolf.
Notable works
Several notable works employing stream of consciousness are:
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground (1864)
- Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1873-77)
- Édouard Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888)
- Knut Hamsun's Hunger (1890) and Mysteries (1892)
- Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time, (or À la recherche du temps perdu ) 1913 - 1927
- Arthur Schnitzler's Lieutenant Gustl (1900), 'Fräulein Else (1924)
- T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
- Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage (1915-28)
- James Joyce's
- Eveline (1914)
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
- Ulysses (1922)
- Finnegans Wake (1939)
- Italo Svevo's La coscienza di Zeno (1923)
- Virginia Woolf's
- Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
- To the Lighthouse (1927)
- The Waves (1931)
- Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926)
- Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf (1927)
- William Faulkner's
- The Sound and the Fury (1929)
- As I Lay Dying (1930)
- Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
- Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song (1932)
- Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun (1939)
- J. D. Salinger's
- Seymour: An Introduction (1963)
- William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness (1951)
- Samuel Beckett's 'trilogy' :
- Molloy (1951)
- Malone Dies (1951)
- The Unnamable (1953)
- Albert Camus' The Fall (1956)
- Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (1956)
- William Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959)
- Jack Kerouac's
- Jerzy Andrzejewski's Gates to Paradise (1960)
- Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)- particularly Chief Bromden's thoughts during electroshock therapy.
- Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (Hopscotch) (1963)
- Hubert Selby Jr.'s
- Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964)
- The Room (novel) (1971)
- Requiem for a Dream (1978)
- Albert Cohen's Belle du Seigneur (1968)
- Giuseppe Berto's Il male oscuro (1964)
- Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
- Oğuz Atay's Tutunamayanlar (The Disconnected) (1972)
- Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
- Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea's Illuminatus! (1975)
- Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren (1975)
- Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony(1977)
- Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (1980–83)
- Pier Vittorio Tondelli's
- Altri libertini (1980)
- Pao Pao (1982)
- Nadine Gordimer's July's People (1981)
- Bahram Bayzai's Death of Yazdgerd (1982)
- Bret Easton Ellis'
- Less Than Zero (1985)
- The Rules of Attraction (1987)
- American Psycho (1991)
- The Informers (1994)
- Glamorama (1998)
- Lunar Park (2005)
- Alan Bennett's A Cream Cracker Under The Settee, (1987)
- Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy (1992)
- Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (1993)
- Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000)
- Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated (2002)
- Will Christopher Baer's Phineas Poe trilogy (2005))
- Clarice Lispector's whole work. See:
- Near to the Wild Heart (1943)
- Family Ties (1960)
- The Apple in the Dark (1961)
- The Passion According to G.H. (1964)
- An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures (1968)
- The Stream of Life (1970)
- The Hour of the Star (1977)
- Autran Dourado's
- Voices of the Dead (1967)
- Pattern for a Tapestry (1970)
- Bells of Agony (1974)
- Hilda Hilst's whole work.
- Wang Meng's Voices of Spring
- Jack Feldstein's stream-of-consciousness neon animations.
- Rabih Alameddine's Koolaids: The Art of War (1998), an example of a postmodern application of Stream of Consciousness
The technique has been parodied, for example, by David Lodge in the final chapter of The British Museum Is Falling Down.
See also
- Free indirect speech
- Free writing
- Modernist literature
- Psychological fiction
- Soliloquy
- Stream of consciousness (psychology)
- Persona poetry